I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 1
Other Books by Roger Ebert
An Illini Century
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Two Weeks in the Midday Sun:A Cannes Notebook
Behind the Phantom’s Mask
Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion(annually 1986–1993)
Roger Ebert’s Video Companion(annually 1994–1998)
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: An Anthology
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook(annually 1999 and 2000)
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary
With Daniel Curley
The Perfect London Walk
With John Kratz
The Computer Insectiary
With Gene Siskel
The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese,
Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas
This book is dedicated to
Gene Siskel
1946–1999
. . . who liked to ask, “Is this movie better than adocumentary of the same actors having lunch?”
Introduction
The purpose of a movie critic is to encourage good films and discourage bad ones. Of course, there is much disagreement about which is which. The films in this book, however, have few defenders. The degree of their badness ranges from those that are deplorable to others that are merely hilariously misguided. Some of them are even fun, although not so much fun you would want to see them twice.
For years I had a law that I would give the zero star rating only to films I believed were immoral in one way or another. Any other movie, however wretched, would get at least a half-star. In making this selection I find that I have not always adhered to that rule. While everyone would agree that Jaws the Revenge or Little Indian, Big City are very bad movies, for example, few would find them evil—unless it is evil to waste two hours in the lives of unsuspecting ticketbuyers, which it may well be. Other films are in the zero-star category as a sort of default; any star rating at all seems irrelevant to John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, which exists outside critical terms, like the weather.
Some of the worst films in the book are so jaw-droppingly bad they achieve a kind of grandeur. With all of the “making of” documentaries available these days, why did no one record the making of An Alan Smithee Film, or Frozen Assets? What values were expressed at the story conferences on North, the movie that inspired my title? What was the thinking on the set the day they first saw Rosie O’Donnell as an undercover cop in S&M gear in Exit to Eden? Or when they did screen tests for the karate-chopping infants in Baby Geniuses? Or when they added a P.C. disclaimer to Mr. Magoo for fear of offending the nearsighted?
The easiest movies to write about are always the ones at the extremes. Good and bad movies dictate their own reviews; those in the middle are more of a challenge. In writing strongly negative reviews, I am tempted to take cheap shots, and although I have fought that temptation on occasion, there are other times when I have simply caved in to it. I am not proud of all the smartass remarks in this book, but remember that the reviews were written soon after undergoing the experience of seeing the movies, and reflect that when a film insults your intelligence, your taste, and your patience all at once, it brings out the worst in you. The movies made me do it.
ROGER EBERT
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
(Directed by Tom Shadyac; starring Jim Carrey, Sean Young, Courteney Cox; 1994)
You know that the French consider Jerry Lewis the greatest screen comedian of all time. You’ve looked at some Lewis comedies, but you don’t get the joke. You know that a lot of critics praised Steve Martin in The Jerk, but you liked him better after he started acting more normal. You are not a promising candidate to see Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
The movie stars Jim Carrey, best known as the all-purpose white guy on In Living Color, as a Miami detective who specializes in animals. He’ll find your missing bird or your kidnapped pedigree dog. And as the movie opens he’s hired by the Miami Dolphins football team to find their mascot, a dolphin named Snowflake which is mysteriously missing from its home in a large tank at the stadium. The plot deepens, if that is the word, when Dolphin quarterback Dan Marino also goes missing.
Carrey plays Ace as if he’s being clocked on an Energy-O-Meter, and paid by the calorie expended. He’s a hyper goon who likes to screw his mouth into strange shapes while playing variations on the language. He shares his house with so many animals, he’s like those zookeepers on late-night talk shows who always have pets crawling out of their collars. And he is simultaneously a spectacularly good and bad detective.
The story eventually involves Sean Young, who is much too talented for roles like Lieutenant Einhorn of the Miami police department; Udo Kier, once a distinguished German actor-director, now Ronald Camp, sinister millionaire; Courteney Cox as the Dolphin’s chief publicist; and Noble Willingham as the team’s owner. Most of the people look as if they would rather be in other movies. Sean Young is a trouper, however, and does her best with dialogue like, “Listen, pet dick. How would you like me to make your life a living hell?”
The movie basically has one joke, which is Ace Ventura’s weird nerdy strangeness. If you laugh at this joke, chances are you laugh at Jerry Lewis, too, and I can sympathize with you even if I can’t understand you. I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it. Real little kids.
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
(Directed by Steve Oedekerk; starring Jim Carrey, Ian McNeice, Simon Callow; 1997)
I knew a guy once who had an amazing party trick. He could tilt his head way back, and stick a straw all the way up his nose. I hesitate to recount this memory, because if my review falls into the hands of Jim Carrey, we’ll see that trick in the next Ace Ventura movie and, believe me, it’s not the kind of trick you want to see again.
Carrey is an actor who gives new meaning to the term “physical comedian.” In the course of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, he regurgitates in order to feed a starving eaglet; shows how he can push his eyeballs around with his fingertips; sticks his arm down a man’s throat to the elbow (in order to save him from choking on an apple core); and spits so copiously that he covers himself and two other characters with dripping mucus.
Of course it wouldn’t be an Ace Ventura movie if he only expectorated. First he has to snort long and loudly, in order to gather his mucus supply, which he seems to be drawing not only from the sinus area but from every inner bodily crevice. The fundamental principle of this series is that less is not more, and more is not enough.
Consider, for example, the scene where Ace wants to conceal himself while spying on some suspected African bat thieves. He hides inside a giant mechanical rhinoceros. But it’s hot in there, under the African sun, and so he strips. Then the rhino develops operational difficulties, and it’s time for Ace to escape. No points for guessing which of the rhino’s orifices the naked detective chooses for his exit.
With my hand over my heart I have to confess that I did not find this movie very funny. Not funny enough to recommend. Not as good as the original Ace Ventura, which I also did not recommend (but which, on reflection, I probably should have awarded two stars instead of one). Not as filled with incident and invention. And yet I confess I’m inspired by the spirit of the enterprise. Jim Carrey makes no little plans, takes no hostages, cuts no corners, and allows no compromise. I like his attitude.
The movie begins with a wicked satire on the opening scenes of Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger, as Ace desperately tries and fails to save a frightened raccoon, which slips from his grasp and falls off a mountain. Depressed by his failure, Ace goes to live in a Tibetan monastery (inspired by Rambo III). Then he is brought out of retirement by the mysterious disappearance of the sacred bat, which is the symbol of an African tribe.
The tribal scenes are not very funny, and one would say they are not tasteful, except that there is no connection between taste and any scene in an Ace Ventura movie. They reminded me of similar scenes in old B-movies where cannibals stirred pots full of missionaries. With just a little more effort, the sequences could have satirized Political Correctness rather than offending it. (There is an admirable scene where Ace is offended by a woman’s fur neckpiece, and in retaliation knocks out her escort and wears him around his neck.)
The supporting cast includes the invaluable Simon Callow, who, after wonderfully playing the friend who dies of a heart attack in Four Weddings and a Funeral, should have held out for something better than being sodomized by King Kong.
Carrey himself is so manic he makes Jerry Lewis look like a narcolepsy victim. There are laughs in the movie, and an anarchic tone that I admire. But there aren’t enough laughs, and the African tribal stuff doesn’t work, and by the end of the movie I was thinking, if this goes on any longer, he’s going to start sticking straws up his nose.
An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn
(Directed by Alan Smithee; starring Eric Idle, Ryan O’Neal; 1998)
An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn is a spectacularly bad film—incompetent, unfunny, ill conceived, badly executed, lamely written, and acted by people who look trapped in the headlights.
The title provides clues to the film’s misfortune. It was originally titled An Alan S
Wait, it gets better. The movie was directed by Arthur Hiller, who hated the way the film was edited so much that, yes, he insisted his name be removed from the credits. So now it really is an Alan Smithee film. That leaves one mystery: Why didn’t Joe Eszterhas, the film’s writer, take off his name, too?
I fear it is because this version of the film does indeed reflect his vision. Eszterhas is sometimes a good writer, but this time he has had a complete lapse of judgment. Even when he kids himself, he’s wrong. “It’s completely terrible!” a character says of the film within the film. “It’s worse than Showgirls!” Of course Eszterhas wrote Showgirls, which got some bad reviews, but it wasn’t completely terrible. I was looking forward to explaining that to him this week, but he canceled his visit to Chicago, reportedly because his voice gave out. Judging by this film, it was the last thing to go.
Have you ever been to one of those office parties where the p.r. department has put together a tribute to a retiring boss? That’s how this film plays. It has no proper story line. No dramatic scenes. It’s all done in documentary form, with people looking at the camera and relating the history of a doomed movie named Trio, which cost more than $200 million and stars Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan, who play themselves as if they are celebrity impersonators.
The film stars Eric Idle as Smithee, who eventually burns the print, and checks into the Keith Moon Psychiatric Institute in England (ho, ho). Ryan O’Neal plays the film’s producer. I love the way he’s introduced. We see the back of a guy’s head, and hear him saying, “Anything!” Then the chair swivels around and he says “anything!” again, and we see, gasp!—why, it’s Ryan O’Neal! I was reminded of the moment in Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days when the piano player swivels around, and, gasp! it’s—Frank Sinatra!
These actors and others recount the history of the doomed film in unconvincing sound bites, which are edited together without wit or rhythm. One is accustomed to seeing bad movies, but not incompetent ones. Sophomores in a film class could make a better film than this. Hell, I have a movie here by Les Brown, a kid who looks about sixteen and filmed a thriller in his mother’s basement, faking a fight scene by wrestling with a dummy. If I locked you in a room with both movies, you’d end up looking at the kid’s.
In taking his name off the film, Arthur Hiller has wisely distanced himself from the disaster, but on the basis of what’s on the screen I cannot, frankly, imagine any version of this film that I would want to see. The only way to save this film would be to trim eighty-six minutes.
Here’s an interesting thing. The film is filled with celebrities playing themselves, and most of them manifestly have no idea who they are. The only celebrity who emerges relatively intact is Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, who plays a private eye—but never mind the role, just listen to him. He could find success in voice-over work.
Now consider Stallone. He reappears in the outtakes over the closing credits. Such cookies are a treat for audiences after the film is over. Here they’re as bad as the film, but notice a moment when Stallone thinks he’s off camera, and asks someone about a Planet Hollywood shirt. Then he sounds like himself. A second later, playing himself, he sounds all wrong. Jackie Chan copes by acting like he’s in a Jackie Chan movie, but Whoopi Goldberg mangles her scenes in a cigar bar, awkwardly trying to smoke a stogie. It’s God’s way of paying her back for telling Ted Danson it would be funny to wear blackface at the Friars’ Club.
Alien Resurrection
(Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman; 1997)
Between Alien and Aliens, fifty-seven years passed, with Ellen Ripley in suspended animation. Between Aliens and Alien3, she drifted through space in a lifeboat, before landing on a prison planet. In all three films she did battle with vile alien creatures constructed out of teeth, green sinew, and goo. In Alien3 she told this life form: “I’ve known you so long I can’t remember a time when you weren’t in my life.”
I’m telling the aliens the same thing. This is a series whose inspiration has come, gone, and been forgotten. I’m aliened out. The fourth movie depends on a frayed shoestring of a plot, barely enough to give them something to talk about between the action scenes. A “Boo Movie,” Pauline Kael called the second one, because it all came down to aliens popping up and going “boo!” and being destroyed.
I found that second film dark and depressing, but skillfully directed by James Cameron (Terminator II). I lost interest with the third, when I realized that the aliens could at all times outrun and outleap the humans, so all the chase scenes were contrivances.
Now here is Alien Resurrection. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is still the heroine, even though 200 years have passed since Alien3. She has been cloned out of a drop of her own blood, and is being used as a broodmare: The movie opens with surgeons removing a baby alien from her womb. How the baby got in there is not fully explained, for which we should be grateful.
The birth takes place on a vast spaceship. The interstellar human government hopes to breed more aliens, and use them for—oh, developing vaccines, medicines, a gene pool, stuff like that. The aliens have a remarkable body chemistry. Ripley’s genes are all right, too: They allow her reconstituted form to retain all of her old memories, as if cookie dough could remember what a gingerbread man looked like.
Ripley is first on a giant government science ship, then on a tramp freighter run by a vagabond crew. The monsters are at first held inside glass cells, but of course they escape (their blood is a powerful solvent that can eat through the decks of the ship). The movie’s a little vague about Ripley: Is she all human, or does she have a little alien mixed in? For a while we wonder which side she’s on. She laughs at mankind’s hopes of exploiting the creatures: “She’s a queen,” she says of the new monster. “She’ll breed. You’ll die.”
When the tramp freighter comes into play, we get a fresh crew, including Call (Winona Ryder), who has been flown all the way from Earth to provide appeal for the younger members of the audience. Ryder is a wonderful actress, one of the most gifted of her generation, but wrong for this movie. She lacks the heft and presence to stand alongside Ripley and the grizzled old space dogs played by Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Dan Hedeya, and Brad Dourif. She seems uncertain of her purpose in the movie, her speeches lack conviction, and when her secret is revealed, it raises more questions than it answers. Ryder pales in comparison with Jenette Goldstein, the muscular Marine who was the female sidekick in Aliens.
Weaver, on the other hand, is splendid: Strong, weary, resourceful, grim. I would gladly see a fifth Alien movie if they created something for her to do, and dialogue beyond the terse sound bites that play well in commercials. Ripley has some good scenes. She plays basketball with a crewman (Perlman) and slams him around. When she bleeds, her blood fizzes interestingly on the floor—as if it’s not quite human. She can smell an alien presence. And be smelled: An alien recognizes Ripley as its grandmother and sticks out a tongue to lick her.
These aliens have a lot of stuff in their mouths; not only the tongue and their famous teeth, but another little head on a stalk, with smaller teeth. Still to be determined is whether the littler head has a still tinier head inside of it, and so on. Like the bugs in Starship Troopers, these aliens are an example of specialization. They have evolved over the eons into creatures adapted for one purpose only: To star in horror movies.
Mankind wants them for their genes? I can think of a more valuable attribute: They’re apparently able to generate biomass out of thin air. The baby born at the beginning of the film weighs maybe five pounds. In a few weeks the ship’s cargo includes generous tons of aliens. What do they feed on? How do they fuel their growth and reproduction? It’s no good saying they eat the ship’s stores, because they thrive even on the second ship—and in previous movies have grown like crazy on desolate prison planets and in abandoned space stations. They’re like perpetual motion machines; they don’t need input.
